The Best Vonnegut Obit You Haven’t Read

Just for a moment of proof that the good men do lives after them, Chronicle copy editor Allen Johnson rescued this obituary of Kurt Vonnegut written many years ago by the late Examiner writer Ed Beitiks. (Obituaries of famous people are often written long in advance of their death.) Beitiks was a fine writer, a very nice man, and someone who passed away much too soon.

Allen sent this to members of the Chronicle staff, but it seemed a shame not to let more people read it.

By Edvins Beitiks

Of the Examiner Staff

In July of 1982, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. rejected attempts by his hometown of

Indianapolis to honor him. He refused to attend the ceremonies, saying from

his New York City home, “”I personally find it embarrassing. It seems to me

this is the kind of thing you do for an author after he’s dead.”

In the years since, Vonnegut has played the role of cantankerous jester,

outspoken conscience of America, a voice supporting the oddness of this

country while warning, “”The system promotes to the top those who don’t

care about the planet.”

Vonnegut’s voice was stilled overnight on Wednesday several weeks after

a fall that left him with permanent brain damage, his wife, Jill Krementz,

told the New York Times on Thursday.

If there was a quality separating Kurt

Vonnegut Jr. from the other World War II vets who turned their talents to

the novel, it was a tongue-in-cheekness, a continually raised eyebrow, an

inability to believe that all this crazy stuff was really happening.

Even Joseph Heller, whose “”Catch-22” set the tone for postwar insanity,

tried to find a plumb line for his world, working it out with each

successive book.

But Vonnegut wrote books that threw up their hands at the

goings-on, delving into sci-fi when the down-to-earth wasn’t enough, or

turning to the reader and simply asking, “”Do you know what’s going on?

Because I’m having problems.”

>Vonnegut wrote 24 books, selling more than 10 million copies, and all 14 of

his novels are still in print. His success started with “”Player Piano” in

1952, followed by “”The Sirens of Titan,” “”Mother Night,” “”Cat’s

Cradle,” and his most successful book, “”Slaughterhouse-Five, or the

Children’s Crusade,” written in 1969. “”Timequake,” the last of

Vonnegut’s novels, was written in 1997 to mixed reviews. His last work, “A

Man Without a Country,” a collection of essays written in reaction to

George W. Bush’s presidency, was published in 2005.

“”Slaughterhouse-Five”

was a remembrance of the firebombing of Dresden on Feb. 13, 1945, seen

through the eyes of the narrator, Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut himself, taken

prisoner of war in the Battle of the Bulge, lived through that firebombing,

hiding underground below a Dresden slaughterhouse. The war colored his

writings, as it did with other WWII vets such as Heller, Norman Mailer,

James Jones and Irwin Shaw, but Vonnegut seemed to take it more in stride.

His postwar life was filled with other attacks and tragedies.

Vonnegut’s older sister, Alice, died of cancer when she was 40, two days

after her husband died in a train crash. His son was diagnosed as a

schizophrenic.

In 1971, “”Slaughterhouse-Five” was outlawed in Oakland

County, Mich., for its language and its “”degradation of the person of

Christ,” and in 1973 copies of the book were burned by the Drake School

Board in South Dakota, a playing-out of Ray Bradbury’s fears in

“”Fahrenheit 451,” the temperature at which a book bursts into flame.

Vonnegut, once a public relations man for General Electirc, took a

light-hearted look at the world outside as he lazed in the general comfort

of postwar America. But by the time “”Bagombo Snuff Box” was put together

he was writing, “”You can’t fight progress. The best you can do is ignore

it, until it finally takes your livelihood and self-respect away. General

Electric itself was made to feel like a buggy whip factory for a time, as

Bell Labs and others cornered patents on transistors and their uses, while

GE was still shunting electrons this way and that with vaccum tubes … Too

big to fail, though, as I was not, GE recovered sufficiently to lay off

thousands and poison the Hudson River with PCBs.”

The short stories in “”Bagombo Snuff Box,” written from 1949-63, during

some of the strongest years for corporate America, are smilingly described

by Vonnegut as “”a bunch of Buddhist catnaps.”

Vonnegut, a fourth-generation German-American born in Indianapolis on Nov.

11, 1922, sometimes took delight in the irony of being born on the fourth

anniversary of Veterans Day, which ended the First World War. He said he

owed his scientific bent to his father, an architect, and his politics to

his family’s New Leftism, which distrusted all “”granfallons, political or

theological.” After graduation from Shortridge High School in 1940,

Vonnegut studied chemistry at Cornell and the Carnegie Institute of

Technology before being drated into the Army.

Captured at the Bulge, he wound up in Dresden during the firebombing, which

killed 135,000 civilians — more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined — a

firebombing carried out, according to some historians, as a naked

demonstration of Allied air power to Russians moving toward Berlin. When he

came out of the Dresden bomb shelter, Vonnegut wrote, “”Everything was gone

but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like

gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse miners, breaking into